Google Ads can be a tremendous tool for growing your business, but like any tool, it must be used properly to reap the full rewards. Here’s a list of frequent Google Ads mistakes that marketers make, along with advice on how to avoid them.
No Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is a key feature of Google Ads. Google Ads may leverage your conversion statistics to help you generate more sales and leads for your business.
If your conversion is a phone call, Google Ads will optimize your campaign to generate more phone calls using previous campaign data.
Action Step: Implement conversion monitoring to track your ROI and adjust your ads for specific goals.
Not Using Smart Bidding Strategies
Smart bidding tactics, such as Target CPA or Target ROAS, allow to automate ad optimization, saving you time and perhaps increasing your ROI.
Action Step: Enable smart bidding methods such as Target CPA or Target ROAS to automate the campaign optimization process.
Unorganized Advertising Groups
Having disorganized ad groups can result in irrelevant traffic and worse conversion rates. It’s critical to organize your ad groups on tightly related subjects or items.
Action Step: To attract more relevant traffic, carefully structure your ad groups around tightly subject topics or items.
No cost controls
Without cost controls, you risk overspending on your advertising. Setting daily budgets and employing bid tactics will help you keep your spending under control. If you employ the Target CPA or Target ROAS bid strategies, you can additionally establish shared budgets and maximum CPC bids.
Set daily budgets and use bid strategies with maximum CPC bids to effectively manage your advertising cost.
Not testing keyword match types
Testing various keyword match types, such as wide, phrase, and precise match, will help you determine which keywords work best for your ads. You should use just one keyword match type per ad group.
Action Step: Select one keyword match type per ad group and evaluate performance biweekly. Try different keyword match types to see if you can increase performance. Broad match keywords can help large budget advertisers cut their cost per conversion over time.
Not Adding Negative Keywords
Neglecting to include negative keywords may result in your ads appearing for unrelated search queries, wasting your advertising budget.
Action Step: Check the search terms report on a regular basis and add negative keywords to prevent irrelevant queries from triggering your advertisements.
One ad per ad group
Only having one ad per ad group limits the amount of data you can collect and makes it difficult to optimize your ad wording.
Action Step: Create several closely related ads per ad group and rotate them to collect more data for tweaking your ad copy.
There are no landing page variations
Failure to test multiple landing pages can result in poorer conversion rates. It is critical to A/B test various designs and messaging to determine what connects with your target demographic.
Action Step: Conduct A/B tests on various landing page designs and messaging to determine which converts best.
Limited or no advertising assets
Ad extensions such as callouts, sitelinks, and phone numbers can greatly improve your ads by offering additional information and a call to action.
Action Step: Include pertinent extensions such as callouts, sitelinks, and phone numbers to provide extra information and increase your ad’s click-through rate.
Not using remarketing
Remarketing campaigns enable you to re-engage with people who interacted with your website but did not convert.
Action Step: Create remarketing campaigns to reconnect with previous visitors and persuade them to take the desired action.
Choosing both the Search Network and the Display Network in the same campaign
When running Google Search advertisements, your advertisements will work best if you only show them when people search for your target keywords. You should segregate your campaigns for the Search Network, Search Partners, and Google Display Network because they perform quite differently.
Action Step: Target your display advertising campaigns to the Google Display Network, while your search advertising campaigns should be targeted to the Google Search Network and its partners.
Not using negative keywords
Negative keywords are really vital to your marketing. Regardless of your campaign goals, you should employ negative keywords to ensure that your advertisements appear for relevant searches. Furthermore, certain words and phrases can be an absolute waste of your money.
Action Step: Use Google Ads’ Search Terms Report to identify negative keyword ideas. Add negative keywords to your campaign and construct negative keyword lists to help you focus on your best-performing keywords.
Poor Keyword Research and Failure to Test Keyword Match Types
You should never target keywords blindly because you may utilize keyword research tools to determine the search volume for your top phrases. In addition, broad match keywords expose your campaign to irrelevant queries. If you’re seeking broad match keywords, you must be meticulous when optimizing your campaign.
Action Step: To get started, target phrase match keywords and conduct intensive keyword research for each campaign. Use Google Keyword Planner to identify the most relevant keywords for your business.
Not Understand the Goals of Google AdWords
Understand what successful marketers do in Google Ads. Generally, they try different targeting, optimize their campaigns, focus on conversions, and employ bidding methods that help them reach their goals.
You will need to keep testing and optimizing until you can successfully use the Target CPA or Target ROAS bid strategy. If you can identify the greatest keywords for your business, you will be able to drive results. It will take time to enhance your results and maximize the potential of your Google Ads account.
Understanding previous mistakes done by other advertisements might help you learn a lot. These are only 14 common mistakes that I have made and observed in other accounts.